Monthly Archives: May 2014

Living in a perpetual upgrade culture, where technological obsolescence is the norm and our personal digital devices have become ubiquitous and mundane artefacts, has huge implications for 21st century art and design archives, and for art and design education. It is with this in mind that students and staff from Central Saint Martins today embarked upon an experimental project set at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which explores designerly relationships with mobile technologies as part of the creative research process. In doing so they are contributing to the ongoing discussion about what digital literacy means in a contemporary art and design setting. Continue reading →

Moodle, the UAL’s new virtual learning environment (VLE) has been operational for about a year now. Each course has a site, and students can use it to check timetables, download files or access a brief, for example. To introduce a VLE into any institution at a time of rapid socio-technical flux can be problematic, especially with so many competing digital platforms vying for students’ attention, such as Facebook, Google Tools, Twitter, or blogs.

In this article Sarah Kante takes a look at the user experience of Moodle, asks a range of students – the primary audience – how they use it and what they think of it, and tries to understand how this very important educational tool might be improved. Continue reading →

The hottest day of the year so far, the FA Cup Final and the Data Jam event at the Open Data Institute all coincided on 17 May 2014 in London. Enough has been written about Arsenal’s victory, so this post concentrates on the creative exploration of open data.

As part of Central Saint Martins’ Restless Futures programme, UAL’s Charlotte Webb organised a workshop with the ODI, for curious students and staff to collaboratively and creatively engage with the possibilities of open data. Continue reading →

3D processes, such as laser-cutting, 3D printing and modelling, are an integral part of the University community’s experiments with form and materials, and their importance is growing across subject areas. Undergoing rapid advances, these processes have been talked about in the media, integrated in our syllabus, and have stimulated our imaginations in myriad ways.

UAL alumna Sarah Kante talks to CSM Specialist Technician Billy Dickinson about Almost Lost – a recent project for English Heritage – his views on the craft of 3D processes, and his thoughts about their associated myths and realities. Continue reading →

University of the Arts London journalism student, James Childs, is exploring some of the ways in which digital technologies have impacted upon, and are influencing, the practices of the Hip Hop community. He is doing so in order to explore what digital literacy means in an holistic sense, what are the different forms of digital literacy that a creative community displays and how might their experience help other artistic communities to understand their own evolving relationships with digital technologies? What does it mean to be digitally literate in the world of Hip Hop?

For his first article James spoke with Fatawu Issah, a Hip Hop enthusiast and fan. Continue reading →

Anna Nazarova, a final year Central Saint Martins MA Communication Design student, provides a fascinating account of her interwoven creative process, and in particular highlights the imbricated relationship between physical and digital materials that she employs as part of her design practice.

“In my final year project, as part of my cross-disciplinary practice, I work with typography – its role and place today. I am rethinking the visual and conceptual role of future arts and crafts and their digital contexts. My major piece of research asks: How can typography be represented in an alter-modern context? In my work I place typography, languages and technologies at the intersection of art and design, with a reflection of contemporary context through the concept of altermodernity. Continue reading →

This article aims to provide an overview of a project named ‘Configure PATH: surprise the system’, developed at the Interaction and Architectural Space workshop at CHI 2014. Written under the fug of jet-lag, and with memories already fading…here goes…

The intent of the two-day CHI workshop was to bring together multi-disciplinary expertise from architecture and human computer interaction to foreground the role of interactive technologies in spatial settings. The group of five that developed the ‘Configure PATH’ project was led by the Mixed Reality Lab’s Holger Schnadelbach, and the Bartlett’s Tasos Varoudis – co-organisers of the workshop. Along with three other teams, we were asked to create an interactive intervention in a space near to the Toronto Convention Centre, which would then be presented and analysed with all participants. Continue reading →